


Temper

by someinstant



Series: Foundry [2]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Complicated Relationships, Episode Related, Episode: s08e02 A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, F/M, Pining, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 03:05:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18651607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/someinstant/pseuds/someinstant
Summary: Arya moved like she knew the tree that grew the bow, the reed that yielded the arrow.  Like she knew the heart of the man she was aiming to kill.





	Temper

“There,” he said, holding the surly boy by the shoulder, bending him close to the axe’s dark heat. “Look at the gloss of it, right along the heel.  You’ve quenched too far, made it too hard.”

“Axes are hard, ain’t they?” The boy squirmed in his grasp, but Gendry held tight.  It was no good making weapons that shattered first strike, and the boy needed to learn, and quick.  They had a day, maybe a little more. Maybe less.

“The blade of an axe should be hard,” Gendry said.  “The heel should be tough. Cool the edge fast and then don’t fuck with beard or heel until it you see that shine. You understand me? Else we’re sending men to die with a broken bottle on a stick, not an axe.  Melt that bloody thing down and do it again.” He let the boy go and watched as he picked up the ruined axehead with a set of tongs, stomping off the far corner of the forge, muttering under his breath.

“It’d be nice not to need the idiot ones,” Falden said, prying open a mold with his blistered hands.  Three dark knives clattered out, clean and deadly.

“Aye,” Gendry said, and turned back to the half-carved block of wax he’d stolen from the chandler.  Most weapons, he’d use sand or black lead and cast rough. It worked well enough, they’d found, but not for hers.  Hers wanted balance. Precision. And she was still so small.

Small, but direct and deadly, he thought, and carved at the tang of blade.  There wasn’t time for proper highborn finery, not with what he was already doing. Lost wax casting, then the pour when the mold was ready, then steel fittings for the staff and hidden blade, then checking the balance, then putting the whole beknighted thing together.  He’d save the finery for a sword, if he got the chance to make it.

“That for milady?” Falden asked, carrying a bucket of slagged glass to dump.  Gendry didn’t answer. “Taking your time on it.”

“She needs a good weapon. I make good weapons,” Gendry said.  Picked up the wax quarterstaff head in his hand, tried to imagine the weight converted to dragonglass, to feel the balance.

“She likes you,” Falden said, and Gendry rolled his eyes, glad of the soot and shadows covering the flush he felt along his ears.  “Never come down to the forge before you got ‘ere.”

“Just knew her when she was little, is all,” Gendry said. The men gossiped like fishwives along the Mudgate, and the lady’s visits to the forge had set more than one tongue wagging. “She was a pain in my arse,” he said, which was the least of it, but had the benefit of being true.

“I wager she was,” Falden said.

“She’s a lady,” Gendry said, flat, and put down the wax model before he ruined it.  

“Aye,” said Falden, meeting his eye, steady-like.  The North protected its own. “She’s a lady.”

Gendry nodded, slow, and Falden glanced at the smudged parchment on the workbench, apparently satisfied.  “You’ll need the lathe for that staff,” he said at length.

“I will,” Gendry said. It was the middle bit, the hidden third blade that would be trickiest.  “Oak heart would be best. Who’s got a feel for it?”

“I do,” said Falden.  “Come and find me when you’ve done the pour.”

* * *

Taking a hammer to dragonglass was about angles and curves, and seeing the hit before it was struck.  Hit at the right angle, the right strength, and shallow semi-circle fragments flew off like chips of ice across a frozen lake.  Fullers carved themselves like gutters down the center of swords easy as breathing, if the angle was right. But hit an untempered piece dead-on, and it crumbled and spiderwebbed like red short in brimstone, and that was a mark’s work wasted, tossed to the slag pile.

Edgework was always tricky no matter the material, but it was miles worse with dragonglass; the blade needed a sharp quenching, cold and fast to freeze the narrow cutting line hard, and the body needed tempering, long and slow and patient to let it settle into a toughness that would wear with strike after strike.  And the edge and body had to remain of a piece, and still wholly unknown to each other.

Most who didn’t know the trade thought smithing was about striking hot iron until sparks flew about, but Gendry had found it to be mostly watching and waiting for the right color to glow, the right gloss to emerge, and knowing when to lay down the hammer and let things rest.

* * *

Dark was gathering as Gendry washed his face and neck and hands, stripped to the waist, scrubbing with a handful of soft grey soap under the cold of the pump.  His hands stung with the sharp lye, and his eyes felt gritty; too many hours of heat and ash and frenzied hammering and delicate work. He stuck his whole head under, hoping the bite of the water would wake him.

“Prettying yourself up for your funeral?” Polym asked, leaning heavily against a post.  Gendry frowned, and wiped at his face and chest with sacking. Ran his hand over the short bristles of his hair to brush the water off.

“Shouldn’t be in the forge if you’re sotted,” he said.  Too many fires started that way, and the ale fair wafted off the man, as it did around many in the courtyard.  Drink was the rule of the night, it seemed. The dead would be at Winterfell before dawn.

“Aye, I’ll come no further,” Polym said, good-natured and swaying in his cups. “Only came to see if you’d have a drink with us, then, as we’re all like to die.”  He sounded comfortable with the notion, and Gendry wondered if it was the drink or the North that did it. He pulled on his shirt, and decided it was probably the North.

“I have to deliver the Lady Arya’s weapon,” Gendry said.  “Shouldn’t take long. I’ll come and find you after,” he said, looking down to buckle his jerkin with stiff fingers.  “Could use a drink.”

Polym snorted. Gendry looked up to see the striker shaking his head.  “Couldn’t send it with a runner, could you.”

Gendry turned to pick up his cloak, throwing it over his shoulders before answering.  “She was a friend, once,” he said at last. “Haven’t had many of those. I’d like to wish her well before it all goes to shit.”

“‘S like that, then,” Polym said, knowing, and Gendry considered breaking his nose for him.

“No,” he said, sharp. “It’s not fucking _like that_. It’s not like anything but what it is,” he said, shoving his hands into leather gloves. “And what it is, is that I’m a bastard from Flea Bottom, and she’s a lady of House Stark, and we were friends for a time when it didn’t much matter, and now it does.” Except it didn’t matter at all, not really, because what the fuck did corpses care about rank and nobility and the wrong side of blankets.

“As you say,” Polym said, and held up his hands:  _peace_.  “We’ll hold a seat for you, Waters.”

Gendry forced a thin smile to the edge of his mouth.  “Don’t drink all the ale before I get there.”

“Can’t promise the impossible,” Polym said, and lurched into the torchlight.

* * *

The thing of it was, she’d spent days at the edge of his sight, around corners and buried in shadow, like a horsefly buzzing just far enough away to ignore until it bit and drew blood-- and now, when he was ready to speak with her, on prepared as it were, she was nowhere to be found.  The servants at the Hall shook their heads; no, the Lady Arya didn’t tell no one where she went of a night, and they were a mite busy at the moment. Her lady sister was in the courtyard, though, if that would do? If not, he could leave his package, and they would deliver it.

“Thanks,” Gendry said, and pulled the long bundle close to his side.  “But I’ll see it into her hands myself.” But he couldn’t spend the night searching the castle; she might be anywhere, and he could miss her by minutes. He wondered for a moment if he should seek out Snow, but that would mean having a conversation Gendry dreaded, for reasons he couldn’t put into words.

 _I knew your sister while you were at the Wall and your brother Robb was fighting_ , he tried to imagine saying.   _We starved together and fought like family and she used to look at me, sometimes, and I let her look. Once, she cried over me as I told her I was going to leave her behind. Now I’ve made her a weapon to wield against the dead, and I know she will use it._

He couldn’t for the life of him decide how that conversation would end.  Probably with Snow’s fist in his gut.

Unsure what else to do, Gendry walked back towards the forge.  The long tables in the courtyard were raucous and silent by turns, women and men downing their last full swallows of life, and finding that the dregs bitter.  He saw Polym and the other men from the forge huddled tight along a far bench, no space between them, putting away ale with grim determination. No place for him there.

The forge was unnervingly quiet as he entered, the great bellows finally stilled, and the fires dulling to a cool red glow.  An apprentice had very properly laid out the common hammers along the worktable, as though tomorrow would see the regular business of making linchpins and barrel hoops for the cooper.  And there, in the storeroom opposite, where the great sacks of sand and other flux were kept, was a flicker of torchlight and the whisper-thud of a shot striking wood.

She knew the moment he crept through the door, he was sure. Knew it was him, too, and not someone else.  He could see it by the way the line of her back went sharp and alert, and then smooth again, all within the fluid motion of her shot.  

Gendry’d handled a bow often enough; could string and draw one as well as most men his size and strength. And provided his target was still and stuffed with straw, he could sometimes even hit what he aimed at.

Arya moved like she knew the tree that grew the bow, the reed that yielded the arrow.  Like she knew the heart of the man she was aiming to kill. It frightened him a little, stole his breath, the same way the ragged peaks beyond the Wall had frightened him.  Didn’t mean it wasn’t something to see.

“That for me?” she asked, and he gave her the staff.  It sounded like water through the air as she spun it, considering, and something in her eyes settled into satisfaction, into resolve.

She asked about the Red Woman. About other women.  Asked if he’d kept count. Her voice was low, her grey eyes dark and glossy in the torchlight. She was tempered to a toughness that took great patience, he realized, and wondered how it had happened, and when.

She took off a glove, and he thought: _she could kill me with a strike, like a cornered hart_.  Took off the second, and he said, “Three.”

She advanced.  Offered. Gendry thought: _she has the loveliest hands_ , unbidden. And when she reached for him, when her hands fumbled against his chest, fast and fine as the beat of blood in his ears, he gave himself up as lost.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, fuck. I guess it's a series, then.


End file.
